Contact Information

Academic Background

PhD in English, 2007 (The Graduate Center, City
University of New York)

B.A. in English, 2002 (University of California Riverside)

Biography

Robert Diaz Jr. is an Assistant Professor in
the Women and Gender Studies Program at Wilfrid Laurier University. His
research and teaching focus on the intersections of Asian North American,
Filipino, Sexuality, and Postcolonial Studies.

His first book project, Reparative
Acts: Performing Queer Redress in Philippine Nationalisms, examines
Filipino diasporic film, literature, performance, and new media in order to
interrogate the relationship between histories of nationalism, imperialism, and
redress. In the process, Diaz identifies six key figures that have
been significant to the consolidation of Philippine nationalisms since the
1970's: the victimized Filipina during Japanese duress, the marginalized
city-dweller during the Marcos regime, the transnational returnee or balikbayan,
the overseas contract worker, the "beauty queen", and the international celebrity. Diaz
argues that by queering these figures, artists, intellectuals, and people
participating in the information flows of new media are then able to produce
legible and complex critiques of often limited and institutionalized enactments
of economic, political, and symbolic redress.

His other book project, The Ruse of Visibility: Queer Filipinos/as and Canadian Multiculturalisms, is the first study of its kind. This work examines the experiences of queer Filipinos in the Canadian context. Diaz
analyzes a range of archives, from the Miss Gay Philippines Canada beauty
pageant to the narratives of transgender Filipinos who navigate the Greater Toronto Area. In the process, Diaz notes that the Filipino diaspora's experience with multiple forms of colonialism and racialization offer new perspectives for understanding the limits of Canadian multiculturalism, which carries its own attendant forms of racialization and practices of exclusion.

Before coming to Wilfrid Laurier, Diaz was an
Assistant Professor of English (tenure track) at Wayne State University in
Michigan. He has been awarded two competitive external fellowships, an Andrew
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships at UCLA with the theme of
"Homosexualities: From Antiquity to the Present" (2009-2010), and an Andrew
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at USC with a theme of "Comparative Ethnic
Studies" (2007-2008). Aside from working in the university, Robert
is also committed to community engagement and social justice. He continues this
commitment by working with LGBT and Filipino focused organizations such as ACAS
and Kapisanan, in the Greater Toronto Area.

PUBLICATIONS

IN PRINT

"Queer Love and Urban Intimacies in Martial
Law Manila." Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media,
and Society. 9:2, 2012. University of the Philippines Press.

"Queer Histories and the Global City." GLQ:
A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Volume 18, Number 2-3, 2012. Duke
University Press.

"The Limits of Bakla and Gay: Feminist Readings of My Husband's Lover, Vice
Ganda, and Charice Pempengco" in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.TBA. University of Chicago Press.

"Sexuality" in The Routledge
Companion to Asian American Literature, edited by Rachel Lee. New
York: Routledge Press, forthcoming (March 2014)

"Queer Returns: Failed Balikbayans in
R. Zamora Linmark's Leche and Gil Portes' Miguel/Michelle" in
East of Main Street II, edited by Leilani Nishime and Shilpa Dave. New
York: New York University Press, forthcoming

"Redressive Nationalisms, Victimized Filipinas, and Japanese Duress" in Philippines Palimpsests: Essays for the 21st Century edited by Martin Manalansan and Augusto Espiritu. Forthcoming.